.

1 Motives-based theories
Philosophers who endorse this type of theory differ in terms of what kind of motive they
associate with trustworthiness. For some, it is self-interest, while for others, it is goodwill or
an explicitly moral motive, such as moral integrity or virtue. [4]
For example, Russell Hardin defines trustworthiness in terms of self-interest in his
“encapsulated interests” account (2002). He says that trustworthy people are motivated by
their own interest to maintain the relationship they have with the trustor, which in turn
encourages them to encapsulate the interests of that person in their own interests. In addition,
trusting people is appropriate when we can reasonably expect them to encapsulate our
interests in their own, an expectation which is missing with mere reliance.
Hardin’s theory may be valuable in explaining many different types of trust relationships,
including those between people who can predict little about one another’s motives beyond
where their self-interest lies. Still, his theory is problematic. To see why, consider how it
applies to a sexist employer who has an interest in maintaining relationships with women
employees, who treats them reasonably well as a result, but whose interest stems from a
desire to keep them around so that he can daydream about having sex with them. This
interest conflicts with an interest the women have in not being objectified by their employer.
At the same time, if they were not aware of his daydreaming—say they are not—then he can
ignore this particular interest of theirs. He can keep his relationships with them going while
ignoring this interest and encapsulating enough of their other interests in his own. And this
would make him trustworthy on Hardin’s account. But is he trustworthy? The answer is “no”
or at least the women themselves would say “no” if they knew the main reason for their
employment. The point is that being motivated by a desire to maintain a relationship (the
central motivation of a trustworthy person on the encapsulated interests view) may not
require one to adopt all of the interests of the trustor that would actually make one
trustworthy to that person. In the end, the encapsulated interests view seems to describe only
reliability, not trustworthiness. The sexist employer may reliably treat the women well,
because of his interest in daydreaming about them, but he is not trustworthy because of why
he treats them well.
A different type of theory is what Jones calls a “will-based” account, which finds
trustworthiness only where the trustee is motivated by goodwill (Jones 1999: 68). This view
originates in the work of Annette Baier and is influential, even outside of moral philosophy
(e.g., in bioethics and law, especially fiduciary law; see, e.g., Pellegrino and Thomasma
1993, O’Neill 2002, and Fox-Decent 2005). According to it, a trustee who is trustworthy will
act out of goodwill toward the trustor, to what or to whom the trustee is entrusted with, or
both. While many readers might find the goodwill view problematic—surely we can trust
people without presuming their goodwill!—it is immune to a criticism that applies to
Hardin’s theory and also to risk-assessment theories. The criticism is that they fail to require
that the trustworthy person care about (i.e., feel goodwill towards) the trustor, or care about
what the trustor cares about. As we have seen, such caring appears to be central to a
complete account of trustworthiness.
The particular reason why care may be central is that it allows us to grasp how trust and
reliance differ. The above suggested that they differ because only trust can be betrayed (or at
least let down). But why is that true? Why can trust be betrayed, while mere reliance can
only be disappointed? The answer Baier gives is that betrayal is the appropriate response to
someone on whom one relied to act out of goodwill, as opposed to ill will, selfishness, or
habit bred out of indifference (1986: 234–5; see also Baier 1991). Those who say that
trusting could involve relying on people to act instead on motives like ill will or selfishness
will have trouble distinguishing between trust and mere reliance.
While useful in some respects, Baier’s will-based account is not perfect. Criticisms have
been made that suggest goodwill is neither necessary nor sufficient for trustworthiness. It is
not necessary because we can trust other people without presuming that they have goodwill
(e.g., O’Neill 2002; Jones 2004), as we arguably do when we put our trust in strangers.
As well as being unnecessary, goodwill may not be sufficient for trustworthiness, and that is
true for at least three reasons. First, someone trying to manipulate you—a “confidence
trickster” (Baier 1986)—could “rely on your goodwill without trusting you”, say, to give
them money (Holton 1994: 65). You are not trustworthy for them, despite your goodwill,
because they are not trusting you but rather are just trying to trick you. Second, basing
trustworthiness on goodwill alone cannot explain unwelcome trust. We do not always
welcome people’s trust, because trust can be burdensome or inappropriate. When that
happens, we object not to these people’s optimism about our goodwill (who would object to
that?), but only to the fact that they are counting on us. Third, we can expect people to be
reliably benevolent toward us without trusting them (Jones 1996: 10). We can think that their
benevolence is not shaped by the sorts of values that for us are essential to trustworthiness. [5]
Criticisms about goodwill not being sufficient for trustworthiness have prompted revisions to
Baier’s theory and in some cases to the development of new will-based theories. For
example, in response to the first criticism—about the confidence trickster—Zac Cogley
argues that trust involves the belief not simply that the trustee will display goodwill toward
us but that this person owes us goodwill (2012). Since the confidence trickster doesn’t
believe that their mark owes them goodwill, they don’t trust this person, and neither is this
person trustworthy for them. In response to the second criticism—the one about unwelcome
trust—Jones claims that optimism about the trustee’s goodwill must be coupled with the
expectation that the trustee will be “favorably moved by the thought that [we are] counting
on her” (1996: 9). Jones does that in her early work on trust where she endorses a will-based
theory. Finally, in response to the third concern about goodwill not being informed by the
sorts of values that would make people trustworthy for us, some maintain that trust involves
an expectation about some shared values, norms, or interests (Lahno 2001, 2020; McLeod
2002, 2020; Mullin 2005; Smith 2008). (To be clear, this last expectation tends not to be
combined with goodwill to yield a new will-based theory.)
One final criticism of will-based accounts concerns how “goodwill” should be interpreted. In
much of the discussion above, it is narrowly conceived so that it involves friendly feeling or
personal liking. Jones urges us in her early work on trust to understand goodwill more
broadly, so that it could amount to benevolence, conscientiousness, or the like, or friendly
feeling (1996: 7). But then in her later work, she worries that by defining goodwill so
broadly we
turn it into a meaningless catchall that merely reports the presence of some positive motive,
and one that may or may not even be directed toward the truster. (2012a: 67)
Jones abandons her own will-based theory upon rejecting both a narrow and a broad
construal of goodwill. (The kind of theory she endorses now is a trust responsive one; see
below.) If her concerns about defining goodwill are valid, then will-based theories are in
serious trouble.
To recapitulate about encapsulated-interest and will-based theories, they say that a
trustworthy person is motivated by self-interest or goodwill, respectively. Encapsulated-
interest theories struggle to explain how trustworthiness differs from mere reliability, while
will-based theories are faced with the criticism that goodwill is neither necessary nor
sufficient for trustworthiness. Some philosophers who say that goodwill is insufficient
develop alternative will-based theories. An example is Cogley’s theory according to which
trust involves a normative expectation of goodwill (2012).
The field of motives-based theories is not exhausted by encapsulated-interest and will-based
theories, however. Other motives-based theories include those that describe the motive of
trustworthy people in terms of a moral commitment, moral obligation, or virtue. To expand,
consider that one could make sense of the trustworthiness of a stranger by presuming that the
stranger is motivated not by self-interest or goodwill, but by a commitment to stand by their
moral values. In that case, I could trust a stranger to be decent by presuming just that she is
committed to common decency. Ultimately, what I am presuming about the stranger is moral
integrity, which some say is the relevant motive for trust relations (those that are
prototypical; see McLeod 2002). Others identify this motive similarly as moral obligation,
and say it is ascribed to the trustee by the very act of trusting them (Nickel 2007; for a
similar account, see Cohen and Dienhart 2013). Although compelling in some respects, the
worry about these theories is that they moralize trust inappropriately by demanding that the
trustworthy person have a moral motive (see below and also Mullin 2005; Jones 2017).
Yet one might insist that it is appropriate to moralize trust or at least moralize
trustworthiness, which we often think of as a virtuous character trait. Nancy Nyquist Potter
refers to the trait as “full trustworthiness”, and distinguishes it from “specific
trustworthiness”, which is trustworthiness that is specific to certain relationships (and
equivalent to the thin sense of trustworthiness I have used throughout; 2002: 25). To be fully
trustworthy, one must have a disposition to be trustworthy toward everyone, according to
Potter. Let us call this the “virtue” account.
It may sound odd to insist that trustworthiness is a virtue or, in other words, a moral
disposition to be trustworthy (Potter 2002: 25; Hardin 2002: 32). What disposition exactly is
it meant to be? A disposition normally to honor people’s trust? That would be strange, since
trust can be unwanted if the trust is immoral (e.g., being trusted to hide a murder) or if it
misinterprets the nature of one’s relationship with the trustee (e.g., being trusted to be friends
with a mere acquaintance). Perhaps trustworthiness is instead a disposition to respond to trust
in appropriate ways, given “who one is in relation” to the trustor and given other virtues that
one possesses or ought to possess (e.g., justice, compassion) (Potter 2002: 25). This is
essentially Potter’s view. Modeling trustworthiness on an Aristotelian conception of virtue,
she defines a trustworthy person as “one who can be counted on, as a matter of the sort of
person he or she is, to take care of those things that others entrust to one and (following the
Doctrine of the Mean) whose ways of caring are neither excessive nor deficient” (her
emphasis; 16).[6] A similar account of trustworthiness as a virtue—an epistemic one,
specifically—can be found in the literature on testimony (see Frost-Arnold 2014; Daukas
2006, 2011).
Criticism of the virtue account comes from Karen Jones (2012a). As she explains, if being
trustworthy were a virtue, then being untrustworthy would be a vice, but that can’t be right
because we can never be required to exhibit a vice, yet we can be required to be
untrustworthy (84). An example occurs when we are counted on by two different people to
do two incompatible things and being trustworthy to the one demands that we are
untrustworthy to the other (83). To defend her virtue theory, Potter would have to insist that
in such situations, we are required either to disappoint someone’s trust rather than be
untrustworthy, or to be untrustworthy in a specific not a full sense. [7]
Rather than cling to a virtue theory, however, why not just accept the thin conception of
trustworthiness (i.e., “specific trustworthiness”), according to which X is trustworthy for me
just in case I can trust X? Two things can be said. First, the thick conception—of
trustworthiness as a virtue—is not meant to displace the thin one. We can and do refer to
some people as being trustworthy in the specific or thin sense and to others as being
trustworthy in the full or thick sense. Second, one could argue that the thick conception
explains better than the thin one why fully trustworthy people are as dependable as they are.
It is ingrained in their character. They therefore must have an ongoing commitment to being
accountable to others, and better still, a commitment that comes from a source that is
compatible with trustworthiness (i.e., virtue as opposed to mere self-interest).
An account of trustworthiness that includes the idea that trustworthiness is a virtue will seem
ideal only if we think that the genesis of the trustworthy person’s commitment matters. If we
believe, like risk-assessment theorists, that it matters only whether, not how, the trustor will
be motivated to act, then we could assume that ill will can do the job as well as a moral
disposition. Such controversy explains how and why motives-based and risk-assessment
theories diverge from one another.